Native American stories have long been underrepresented in genre fiction. In mainstream Science Fiction, a survey of the literature shows native peoples of North America too often trapped in the amber of yesteryear, confined to notions of noble savagery, braids and loincloths.

In recent years, however, a new wave of Authors has emerged — to CHANGE all that. There has been an explosion of novels, comics, graphic novels and short stories from writers blending SCI-FI and Fantasy with Native narratives.

Some see this wave as a natural extension of Native American narrative traditions, which often have SCI-FI elements, like tales about visitors from outer space and creation myths about humanity descending from the sky.

“Indigenous people have always been writing and telling science-fiction stories, but it hasn’t been labeled as such,” says Blaire Topash-Caldwell, a citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians.

This WAVE includes writers like Cherie Dimaline, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Stephen Graham Jones.

Cherie Dimaline is a Canadian Ojibwe/Métis author known for — The Marrow Thieves — a dystopian science fiction novel. It depicts a world where people can no longer dream. Only the indigenous peoples of North America still have the ability to dream. They are hunted for their very marrow that can cure the dreamless.

Rebecca Roanhorse is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. Her debut novel — Trail of Lightning — follows a Native American woman living in Dinétah, the traditional homeland of the Navajo tribe. Isolated from the rest of the chaotic world, it is protected by a series of vast, magical walls that roughly encompass parts of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. Ancient gods walk the earth and some individuals manifest special abilities known as clan powers.

Some authors say that SCI-FI and Fantasy settings allow them to reimagine the Native experience in ways that wouldn’t be possible in realistic fiction.

Stephen Graham Jones, author of — The Only Good Indians — is a member of the Blackfeet tribe who grew up in Texas. He often uses the framework of horror to examine inequality that Native Americans face. “The intent is to rebalance the world, and the world we live in is not like that.”

This WAVE is also impacting the Silver Screen. In 2015, Shondin Silversmith wrote about the new film “Legends from the Sky”, describing it as part of a new genre: NATIVE SCI-FI.

“This is one of the first Native American sci-fi UFO films in the world, if not the very first,” said director Travis Hamilton. “It’s a sci-fi Native thriller. This is a new genre for us. I’m curious to see how people respond to it.”

As Award-Winning Authors who write Sci-Fi for Young Adult readers, we also believe DIVERSITY in Science Fiction can be a key to fighting RACISM. A short, one minute video expressing this idea appears on VIMEO:

Inspired by Hopi mythology, each volume of THE SURVIVAL TRILOGY explores native beliefs and mythology pertaining to Alien Life — from a unique cultural point of view — book one: Native American, book two: Asian American, and book three: African American. All are connected … through Hopi prophecy.

Publishers Weekly on October 23, 2017 described Book One, A GLEAM OF LIGHT as “Native American mythology intersects with UFOlogy in this earthbound tale of first contact and extraterrestrial influence.” GLEAM was also a Finalist in the 2019 Readers’ Favorite International Book Awards.

DIVERSITY is here — with Native American stories to change SCI-FI forever. Why? Because the world to come is bigger, more complex, and more diverse than most of us can ever imagine. We will all need a new kind of Science Fiction — with a very different view of humanity’s future — to help us embrace it.

***

The world as we know it, is CHANGING … right before our eyes — just like Sci-Fi writers have predicted for at least a century — but in ways many of us never anticipated.

Why? First of all, because it needs to happen–RIGHT NOW. Secondly, because the human race can never evolve or reach its potential without change. And thirdly, because if we do NOT meet this historic moment by embracing essential truths about race, humanity will not survive.

racism: a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities
and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of one race over another.

Let’s face it: Indigenous Peoples — including Native Americans, Asian Americans, African Americans and more — don’t show up very often in mainstream Science Fiction without being plagued by racial stereotypes. In a genre known for its creativity, Sci-Fi often lets its readers down.

Well … a new wave of Science Fiction writers are fighting to CHANGE all that.

After the 1960’s, there was an explosion of new literature created by Native American writers. It is often characterized by themes — like sacred landscapes, and the conflict of being torn between Two Worlds: one defined by Ancient Mythology, the other by Modern Society. A new genre within speculative fiction, Indigenous Futurism, seeks to challenge racist ways of thinking about our future. It draws on native knowledge, culture, stories, language and traditions — to reimagine our world.

This wave includes writers like Cherie Dimaline, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Nnedi Okorafor.

Cherie Dimaline is a Canadian Ojibwe/Métis author known for — The Marrow Thieves — a dystopian science fiction novel. It depicts a world where people can no longer dream. Only the indigenous peoples of North America still have the ability to dream. They are hunted for their very marrow that can cure the dreamless.

Rebecca Roanhorse is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. Her debut novel — Trail of Lightning — follows a Native American woman living in Dinétah, the traditional homeland of the Navajo tribe. Isolated from the rest of the chaotic world, it is protected by a series of vast, magical walls that roughly encompass parts of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. Ancient gods walk the earth and some individuals manifest special abilities known as clan powers.

Nnedi Okorafor is a Nigerian-American writer of fantasy and science fiction best known for — The Binti Series — about a young Himba girl with the chance of a lifetime: to undertake an interstellar journey and attend the prestigious Oomza University. But when it is attacked, Binti ends up alone on a ship full of beings who murdered her crew. It will take all of her wits to survive the voyage.

Diversity has come at last to Science Fiction. It is the key to fighting racism. All of these writers have endured praise and criticism. Our world is CHANGING forever. As a species, to reach our potential, humanity must evolve. We must open our minds and our hearts to essential truths — now coming to us from Indigenous Voices.

Why? Because the world to come is bigger, more complex, and more diverse than most of us can ever imagine. We will all need a new kind of Science Fiction — with a very different view of humanity’s future — to help us embrace it.

It’s an essential truth about life: “You are what you dwell upon.”

As we face the challenges of growing up, we all need heroes that we can relate to. And they come to many of us from the world of Fiction — through books, movies and television.

Heroes are all about overcoming adversity. They are loved for being strong, smart, making the best of bad situations, sticking to what they believe in, and always doing the right thing — no matter what the cost.

Relatable heroes in fiction can mean even more — because they are human enough for us to see ourselves in them. They spark passion and idealism in children — including boys and girls of every color — then keep those fires burning in adults.

We need diversity in the stories that we share — and in our heroes.

Nora Ephron was an American journalist, writer, and filmmaker — nominated three times for the Academy Award for Best Writing: for Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally…, and Sleepless in Seattle. She gave this advice to young women:

“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”

Ask any woman who grew up with fictional heroes like Nancy Drew, Hermione Granger and Katniss Everdeen, and they’ll speak of bravery, love, and courage as the basis of true strength. They remember a sense of empowerment, and say things like: “Her existence made me feel like maybe I could grow up to be the same.”

Researchers at Ohio State University found that people, while reading fiction, can find themselves feeling the emotions, thoughts and beliefs of a character — as if these are their own. In fact, it can lead to real-world change in one’s behavior. So, by immersing ourselves into the world of a fictional hero, we may actually find ourselves on the path to personal growth.

For readers of all ages, visionary fiction offers more than an escape: It provides a road map to set out on one’s own real life journey to a different, better place.

You are what you dwell upon. During challenging times — like these — what could be more inspirational, than that?

It’s a question often posed in classic Sci-Fi books and movies — to challenge us.

In the 1968 classic, Planet of the Apes, when the chimp ‘animal psychologist’ Zira fails to get the wounded astronaut Taylor to speak, Dr. Zaius says, “The sooner he is exterminated the better…it’s a question of simian survival!” Later, when he orders explosives to seal up a cave with evidence of man’s superiority, the young chimp Lucius cries, “Why must knowledge stand still? What about the future?” Zaius replies, “I may just have saved it for you.”

The fight for SURVIVAL is often characterized as “humanity versus anything nonhuman” — such as apes, or robots or aliens.

Most often the battle is won through military means or clever use of technology like a computer virus to outwit the enemy (Independence Day). Sometimes it is simply ‘dumb luck’, like when humanity is saved from Martian invaders by common microbes in War of the Worlds.

But what if our survival on Earth depends on something else altogether — like our ability to adapt to CHANGE in a way we never expected?

What if there was some inevitable force at work, transforming our world slowly over time … and survival required an expansion of consciousness — sometimes referred to as “enlightenment” — meaning a willingness to accept all living things without judgement?

There is — though you might not know it, because so many “gatekeepers” in our society have labored long and hard to “protect” us from one simple truth: beneath all the superficial differences that separate us, we are the same.

Students of history might say that humanity has been part of an “experiment”, ongoing from the moment of our inception. For centuries, wars have been fought between people of different ideology or skin color — when one group migrates to another’s land, and so are characterized as “invaders”; mistreated or driven away in the short term, then slowly, they merge together and are accepted.

Fans of science fiction who follow the work of abduction researchers like Budd Hopkins (“Intruders”) and David A. Jacobs (“The Threat” and “Walking Among Us”) have also come to realize that SURVIVAL is a very real part of the Alien Agenda to join with the human race through hybridization. They mean to settle here on Earth, living side by side with human beings.

It’s already happening.

Science fiction has a way of becoming science reality — because it often points to a future that few of us have ever imagined. Consider Star Trek — where human and alien races have been merging for decades. Every day, we seem to be getting closer to a world involving the mix of humanity with aliens in ways that transform our point of view.

Survival means transformation. We can’t fight them when they are part of us.

 

For lovers of Sci-Fi in the 1970’s, few can forget those epic words, spoken by Richard Dreyfuss as Roy Neary in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Its message still resonates to this day.

Some of us love Science Fiction because at its best, the genre challenges us to question everything we think we know–about the world, ourselves, and our “place” in the universe.

We identify with characters on a quest to find answers–even when it means leaving behind everything we’ve ever been taught. Why? Because we cannot ignore the feeling each time we gaze into the night sky, that

WE ARE NOT ALONE.

Increasingly as I get older, the “truth” presented in Sci-Fi means more than anything else.

My “need to know” keeps me turning, again and again, to thought-provoking stories told by visionary film makers like Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, and Christopher Nolan. New films that fit into this category are few and far between. Watching and waiting for them fills me with anticipation. Recent gems that come to mind: Interstellar with Matthew McConaughey and Arrival with Amy Adams.

These films transcend our expectations, often posing questions that we have not even thought to ask. Critics blast them as “too cerebral”, hoping to dissuade the public from seeing them at all.

Great works of art and fiction are often misunderstood.

Now a new film comes along with great potential: Ad Astra with Brad Pitt. Its tagline:

THE ANSWERS WE SEEK

ARE

JUST OUTSIDE OUR REACH

Few details have been released regarding its storyline. Its Official Site at foxmovies.com describes it as:

A paranoid thriller in space that follows Roy McBride

(Brad Pitt) on a mission across an unforgiving solar

system to uncover the truth about his missing father

and his doomed expedition that now, 30 years later,

threatens the universe.

With its theatrical release only a few days away, we can only hope that Ad Astra will be another Sci-Fi gem…that shines with a glimmer of truth–to challenge all of us.

 

It’s Official! On December 10, 2018, NASA announced that Voyager 2 entered interstellar space, beyond the bounds of our Solar System. The space probe was launched on August 20, 1977, to study the outer planets.

Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to have visited all four gas giants — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — and discovered 16 moons, as well as phenomena like Neptune’s mysteriously transient Great Dark Spot, the cracks in Europa’s ice shell, and ring features at every planet.

How does this important milestone relate to Science Fiction?

According to MEMORY ALPHA for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the fictional Voyager 6 probe around which V’ger was built — was actually a full-scale mock-up of the real world Voyager 1 and 2 probes from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories.

How cool is that?

And now…Voyager 2 has gone “where no man has gone before”.

 

Theorizing as to why the probe had returned to Earth, Spock said, “V’ger must evolve. Its knowledge has reached the limits of this universe…and what it requires…is the answer to its question, ‘Is there nothing more?'”

“What more is there than the universe?” McCoy asked.

“Other dimensions,” Decker replied, “Higher levels of being.”

“The existence of which cannot be proven logically,” said Spock.

“What it needs in order to evolve…” said Kirk, “is a human quality. Our capacity to leap beyond logic.”

 

Science cannot answer every question. When seeking answers about “otherworldly” visitors coming to Earth, we must take into account the wealth of human experience. Good, reliable people from every walk of life have been telling us for decades about remarkable encounters across the globe. Competent researchers like Budd Hopkins, John Mack and David Jacobs have documented the phenomenon of Alien abduction, attempting to unravel its meaning and purpose.

The “truth” can be a hard thing to accept. Especially when “official” sources like the government and newsmedia try to manipulate public opinion, convincing many to reject it.

It is much easier to accept the Lies, because they tell us what we want to hear. The concept of “world acquisition” as presented by Jacobs is indeed frightening…carefully disguised so as not to trigger alarm. It becomes a lot more difficult to fend off “invaders” who merge themselves with the human race slowly over time. The history of mankind is replete with examples of “foreigners” from one culture invading another–rejected violently at first, but eventually accepted as part of the norm.

In almost every case, the greatest obstacle we face is FEAR; Fear of Strangers with “strange ways”, Fear of any “worldview” that does not jive with our own, Fear of discovery that our assumptions about “them” are wrong–all aspects of the same fear–Fear of the Unknown.

The human race is still evolving. Every time cultures long separated begin to merge, it represents another step in our evolution. This process may be bigger than we think, extending beyond the Earth, to other planets across the universe. What if Extraterrestrial visitation and migration is all part of it?

 

To accept that kind of change requires courage, and a willingness to go beyond Fear–to embrace a new kind of reality. The ET’s are not just coming. They’re already here. They’ve been here for a very long time.